Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today
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Did I miss something, or what technology can store gigabytes in a web browser?! Unless they are compressing email aggressively (possible) and storing in SessionStorage/LocalStorage, decompressing on the fly... then this sounds like marketing fluff, or just written poorly.
IndexedDB doesn't have full browser support yet (Edge is listed as having "partial support" [2]), but Chrome, Firefox, and recent versions of Safari all support it.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...
You are of course right, but it's always good to surface pathological worst-case scenarios as interesting counterbalances.
IndexedDB has really, really REALLY bad performance. It's like a turtle that's been trapped in molasses. I did some benchmarks on my (old) laptop here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42288596/websql-has-incr...
For a particularly rare edge case, I periodically have to SIGKILL Chrome so it doesn't crash (due to failed SQLite assertions) when my disk gets full and I have to shuffle things around to make space. In the last instance of this taking place, / had 820KB free.
(Context would probably be useful here: I have a 15+-year long diskspace issue created by being given many many old computers with tiny hard drives and not having the infrastructure/knowhow (when I was younger) to move/sync active projects between machines. I just need to get a couple large HDDs so I can collect and dedupe everything, but I can't work due to health issues so that's proving... fun. This is also blocking all kinds of things such as getting my first smartphone, so I have nowhere to back it up onto!)
Hmm. If I'm reading right it looks like I'm slightly north of you, in Sydney.
Been meaning to add something to my profile. Done.
I'll endeavor to get in touch soon. This is pretty cool.
I'll try running it on my X220 later.
[1]: http://scaljeri.github.io/indexeddb-vs-websql/v2.0.0/index.h...
Either that specific test (I didn't make it, to clarify) or Chromium has a bug.
Depending on how I fiddle with the browser, the test either takes 134 seconds or 6 (!!!) seconds.
Of course when I ran the test for the first time I did it a few times. I think the repeated tests may have triggered these bugs.
If I go to the test page, click the (i) to the left of the domain, hit Cookies, select the domain (the root of the tree listview) and Remove (to remove the IDB, WebSQL and localStorage bits the page sets up) and then run the test, I consistently get 6 seconds.
My suspicion is that, the page is creating 1000 items in localStorage, THEN adding my 10000 on top of that. That would explain the crazy delays.
However, this does not explain why, when I visited the page for the first time in several months, it completed in 6 seconds without any tinkering required.
Note that the page re-fills localStorage on each load - clearing it after the page has loaded is key.
"Works best with IE 6" is so old now you'd think tech folks would think twice.
The browser ecosystem is much healthier now. If Chrome ceases to innovate there are others ready to take over.
Mutt, Pine, Eudora, and Thunderbird, welcome home.
Apparently it's possible, assuming the device has a sufficiently large storage and, I'm assuming, the user accepts.
"For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome"
I just made this as a reply in another thread where the user essentially believed you couldn't have a nice GUI (his example was VS Code) with a native toolkit that's also easy to develop in:
https://i.imgur.com/RPr6VMS.png
https://gitlab.com/mixedCase/poc-qml-vscode
We've had the tools for a long time in desktop, let's not pretend we don't.
In meantime, i will just bookmark your comment :)
Install QtCreator, grab the docs and play around in a new project. You can drag and drop components around in design mode and you'll be able to figure out how QML works from there. It's really intuitive.
Also the point of QtQuick as an alternative to Electron is not to look native beyond the menus and dialogs.
And you probably associate Qt with Qt widgets, not QtQuick. Qt widgets actually tries to resemble and behave like native widgets, and it will let you get to that point if you actually care about that.
Most people making cross plat applications don't, which is why popular Qt widgets applications like VirtualBox and VLC don't look native, and QtQuick applications like Telegram for Desktop just ignore the desktop's HIGs completely.
What? Let's not rewrite history. I has been easy and cheap to create desktop UIs for decades, literally. I was using Borland Delphi 1.0 as a 13 year old and could have a basic Windows UI app up and running in ten minutes.
There have been many great cross-platform and platform-specific toolkits that are easy to use. E.g. you can teach someone with some Python knowledge how to make basic Qt desktop applications in one hour or so. It's literally as simple as dragging some widgets to a window and writing some lines of wrapper code.
I recommend anyone who thinks that developing applications using web UIs is easier/cheaper to look at some Delphi 1.0 videos. E.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_3K_0vjUhk
This was how we developed desktop applications 22 years ago on machines with 4 or 8 MB RAM. And it is still a whole lot easier and more efficient than a web app.
Additionally, Microsoft has their own framework similar to what QML offers: WPF. The problem with it is that it doesn't have cross platform support, something they wanted to have for VSCode.
It's all exhorbitantly easy to use. Cost is not the issue, specially since they already have a lot of really talented people working on VS Code.
I have used quite a few UI toolkits since those days and am yet to agree with the opinion that the Frankenstein mixture of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is a better UI toolkit.
The thing about efficient language wasn't 100% targeted at web technologies alone, but at the general waste of computing resources for something as trivial as a mail client. Just because we have SSDs, gigabytes of RAM and CPUs that do a whole lot of cycles doesn't mean wasting a good portion of it is a good idea.
I was saying that's the right trade-off to choose in a lot of common use cases. Because most UI toolkits are pretty limiting, and the web toolkit can be amazingly powerful and productive. Of course, if you follow the latest fads in the awful js community they are a nightmare, but lets not pretend that's the only way to use the platform when it makes sense to pay the efficiency cost.
no different to having your javascript decryption routines done by a website
Nonetheless you're absolutely correct; i would prefer firefox to chrome.
Right. This is as if Outlook was written in VBA and ran inside Word.
As the other commenter pointed out it's a safe bet for marketing purposes and looks best aesthetically. But the confusion here could be a real problem for early adopters.
think electron app, but without electron, and instead running directly in chrome.
Edit: MS Edge also has 250MB-500MB; they're just always playing catch up, even when their market share has dwindled...
No, that is not a website or webapp, it's a Chrome app.
"permissions": [ "unlimitedStorage" ]
*in the near future
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1921048/limit-of-localst...
I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm confused.
First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a product name.
They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact, outlook, thunderbird, etc).
Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks
Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think gorgeousness would be a compelling reason to move away.
Gmail can work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a mobile device.
Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different mail client?
Really at a loss how I could be faster 'at doing my email' -- for people I see who struggle with email, a small portion of their problem is familiarity with the features of their client, but most of it is because their workflow is poor. Rarely is it because the mail client is actually broken and working against you. (Outlook being the obvious exception.)
[1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-an...
Try to delete a few thousand messages at a time, and see it not just choke, but cause timeouts or 500 errors when you try to reload the inbox in another tab.
At least it consistently does this for me over several accounts, both regular Gmail and paid apps accounts.
What kind of workflow do you have where you need to delete a few thousand messages, and how often does that happen?
I've developed habits of using mail for all kinds of notifications because it tends to work with other services, and it mostly works with Gmail too, exception deletion it a totally pathological case. All they'd needed to do would be to queue large operations in the background...
Can you describe your workflow?
One issue I have with gmail is that it takes a million clicks and like 10 seconds to filter email so that I never see that sender/subject/whatever again. Do you have a solution?
For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end. For mail I only want to be able to search for later I'll filter to auto-archive on receipt.
I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course).
I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either) but that's based on a relatively small set of anecdata.
When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?
How? Through unsubscribes?
I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course).
So on mobile you are switching back and forth between apps a bunch? While you process email?
I just want to understand the workflow a bit better.
I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either)
How do you use a task tracker correctly/incorrectly?
* When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?*
Yeah. I have a lot of transactional emails that I want to archive. Maybe if I sat down for two hours I'd be done. My personal inbox is a mess.
Yes - I take the effort to unsubscribe from unwanted mail. These days much easier, as the unsubscribe link is usually to be found in the email itself. (In the olden days it was a bit trickier, getting yourself off lists.) Worst case I'll mark it as spam. The intent is to not have my mail archive crufted up with stuff I don't want - it reduces search efficacy later.
On mobile I usually don't do a lot of mail 'processing' -- phones frustrate me, and I defer most things to when I have a decent keyboard & screen in front of me. I do have trello and trello-add-card (widget) on my phone's home page, and the latter is a fast way to cut-n-paste new items into. There's also the option to forward email to your private trello board/inbox using the obfuscated email address they provide for each board. During your nightly task review you would then tidy up the card title & description.
How do you use a task-tracker correctly ... now that's a big question :) Biggest thing for me is that I trust that when something goes into my task tracker, I can get rid of it from email, my brain, post-it notes, etc. Sensible columns categories, thoughtful card names, learn the keyboard shortcuts (desktop web trello client in my case), colour coding, try to make cards describe actionable steps, 'next steps' should be do-able right now (cards with dependencies can't be 'in progress', f.e.).
Is there a requirement that you observe or interact with each of the transactional emails you're receiving? Is it something that could be handled by a script, log analyser, etc? Or when you say you want to archive them, do you mean the time-consuming process is identifying candidates for manual or automatic archival?
[0]: Keyboard shortcut for More > arrow down to Filter messages like these > adjust rules if needed > Enter
I would say that gmail performance is well above adequate – especially in search. But try Fastmail if you want to see blazing.
The last time I've had Gmail suddenly decide to reload the page the moment I need to use it? Never.
For example, here are the last 10 headlines for that category:
- Tracking viewer responses to media, Cinemmerse wants to set the stage for ‘responsive’ entertainment
- Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today
- Y Combinator-backed VIDA turns artwork into fashion, accessories and more
- Immersv raises $10.5M to shake up mobile advertising with some VR flair
- Virtual telescope company Slooh is ready for the eclipse
- Original Tech helps banks offer better loan applications
- ‘Airbnb for boats’ startup Boatsetter buys competitor Boatbound
- LiftIgniter raises $6.4M to bring website personalization to the rest of the internet
- Bitcoin wallet ‘Blockchain’ adds Ethereum support
- B2B platform Releaf helps African businesses by taking the guesswork out of networking
I'd be very interested in a competitor for that feature as I couldn't do without it now and I'd like to know I have options if Google retires it or modify it beyond recognition.
(Brief summary - they are like smart folders but they appear as a single item in your inbox. It enables me to bundle up various newsletters, server alerts and more broadly themed collections of mail and decide which ones should appear in my inbox immediately, daily or never. If I used traditional folders or labels then they end up forgotten or ignored. It allows you to file/categorize but still maintains the "my inbox is my todo list" paradigm.)
And I can't find pricing, TOS, talk about data access (from the features, it appears they want to pull my mail through their servers?) - and a few features that breaks with good email/netiquette (read notifications, links in email that rely on http(s)).
What is this product? What's the monetization plan?
If they're only targeting business users... why don't they also support Edge? Weird. Doubly weird that all their screenshots are in MacOS, which has plenty of safari users, and isn't enterprise-friendly.
So they really are carving out a very small niche - small upmarket businesses that are willing to pay for something other than gmail (when paid gmail also gets you the rest of the google apps suite). Feels like a shonky business-case to me - I can't see how they'd competitively price the accounts if they're basically ruling out companies with large user-bases.
Now, what kind of email servers/hosts do they support? Exchange? Only Gmail? Any Imap? Pop3? Do they have a policy on tls support?
As for market/product/niche - I actually think carving a thin slice out of the business market is a great idea. You could probably get target/interested businesses to pay a pretty premium for a "good email solution", whatever that means for any particular business. I don't think neither exchange nor Gmail would be particularly hard to compete with as a product. Much like some will pay a pretty premium for an ide that boost productivity and/or happiness...
That said, I'm now pretty sure I'm not a target customer for superhuman. But that's fine, I whish them best of luck.
P.s. I hope it will not be exactly like Gmail and have their own email domains. [Name]@superhuman.com is even less professional than Gmail. It's borderline unusable.
If you'd come up with this upfront I wouldn't have signed up.
I don't get this idea - "gmail is cluttered". I would like to know if there's something I am missing. It looks sufficiently clean and uncluttered to me at least. And with a decent Internet connection it's fast too. Well, it's definitely not slow.
For me the latest source clutter are all these hundreds of new apps/services claiming to fix things which aren't really broken or not fix anything at all.
Side-note: Just wondering (it may not be the case), is it common for tech blogs/portals like TC publish sponsored/PR posts without marking the post as such?
I've been lucky enough to have been able to use it for a while now and I'm addicted. The team is super responsive to feedback and take the science of email to the next level.
The reply is of the same kind: changed completely, my relationship (with email!), become indispensable. Plus the "200 mails a day, wow".
It reminds me of my former manager, who couldn't be arsed not to destroy the emails I sent him (must have been a zero-inbox maniac): "You know, I have to manage 80, sometimes 100 mails a day." and forced me to recompose them to send them again (because he suddenly couldn't wait that I come back on the machine on which I typed the original mail).
Yeah, well, I've been getting 300 to 800 mails a day for the last 25 years and I have them all archived (OK, for the 20 years old ones, they must be on a hard drive... somewhere :-) but you could ask me anything for the last couple of years and I would find it after a few minutes, worst case. I even found my Fidonet netmails a couple of years ago). I never lost a mail since I don't delete any (except the occasional spam which got through anti-spam layers).
There's no more news to read yet you still check. There is no more Facebook post yet you still check. There are no more emails for the day yet you still check.
(J/k)
Could you elaborate on how and why it has changed the way you do email and became indispensable?
Filters and folders are a god send for me. I get > 1000 emails a day, so inbox zero using the traditional methods (ie sit there and go though them all) are both stupid and impractical.
What is it called in German? Übermensch?
Hilarious though to see people try.
Admittedly he did manage to harvest some interesting information but mainly it was just managers trying to correct typos.
"Undo send" seems to me to be inherently inferior to having some self-discipline and patience. Whatever last second doubts you've had are now simply pushed forward. Except now you've set a timer, which creates additional chance for failure -- either on the back end or on the user side, e.g. the timer expiring just as you try to panic cancel -- that there isn't when you just don't hit send in the first place.
I get that products have to be designed for human comfort over pure technical effectiveness, but this is design that appeases -- at a very surface level -- one of our least helpful indiscretions.
I eagerly await your new email client which provides both self discipline and patience to users. Until it releases, I suspect the Undo Send option will continue to be used.
If "undo send" gives a psych boost to being obsessive-compulsive, this still doesn't address the additional layer of possible failure. You have better control over your ability to not hit "Send" then you do to do a panic cancel as you do a last second proofread.
You're trying to cram everyone's problem into the same box, it's silly.
There's plenty of reasons you might undo an email if you had the chance.
Taking a 10-minute break is not something I've ever done before I sent an email.
I don't understand why people keep making mistakes.
OT: As a former PINE/ALPINE User I found that reliable Email clients seem to be rare. There seems not to be much besides Thunderbird and Evolution. I neither got Claws Mail nor iScribe to work with my servers under Linux. Any other email client recommendation for Linux?
It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my .muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy. There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.
(I use mu4e, coming from a mixture of Apple's Mail.app, Google/Fastmail web interface, and mutt.)
I'm considering moving to evolution or Thunderbird
Outside the workplace, it's rarely used for personal messages anymore. It's limited to confirmation messages, promotional mailings, forgot password links and that's about it.
The days of email are over. Everything moved into silos like WhatsApp because they offer instant responses email could never offer and a nicer UI.
Well good news, workplaces are still a thing and where a lot of economic activity happens.
Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.
Long live email. Anything that replaces it will probably be a closed proprietary protocol and I don't look forward to that at all.
Okay, so I guess the idea is not so much IM-over-e-mail, but rather a schema that maps IM operations into e-mail operations.
Also, there is ample communication within my personal life where I want to set the expectation of not wanting instant replies.
Mind you, nobody has ever introduced me to a friend via social media.
Meanwhile, SMS is still going strong. Who needs an app?
ok, I feel a little bad adding to the dogpile here, but . . . one of the great things about email is that it's an open standard -- you can use whatever software you want, or even write your own. the very article we're commenting on is about a new email client offering, among other things, an extremely shiny UI. :p
For example, you can't search for people if you don't know their email address. You can't know if an email was successfully delivered or read. The "quoting" of replies is a mess with no standard for doing it.
Asynchronous communication has some huge advantages. For example you tend to put a little more thought into your words since any clarifications will have to wait for a whole round-trip. It's a different mode of communication.
And of course not being siloed is also an advantage in itself.
Exactly. WhatsApp etc are great for exchanging 2 sentence messages with your friends but how do you talk to people outside of your circle?
If you want to message a company or government dept asking about something how would you do that? Worse still how would you contact a specific person that you didn't already know (say an academic at a university)?
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